1912, Entering into the Enchanted, Quite Literally
In 1912 Willa Cather lived in The Village off the side of Washington Square in its burgeoning bohemian literary and creative scene. She was the editor of the acclaimed muckracking McClure’s Magazine on Fourth Avenue and 20th Street, but she had something much more far-reaching in mind with its effects and horizons flowing out of New York City and changing everything from its very core to a vision where life is experienced very differently from what had taken hold of the accepted, even widely admired in the Gilded Age and its industry blind rape of the wild lands and its impersonal abuses of feminine, indigenous, and immigrant, actually its very life-lines in more ways than its resources and workforce. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire had just occurred in her neighborhood one year before with young girls trapped on their floor at work having to either be consumed by flames or look down jump the many stories to their deaths.
That cultural arrogance held closed, self-contorted, almost self-incestuous visions of hoarded statues of gold made in images of themselves with the reality being real bodies mangled on the railroads. It was an unseen cultural dead end of this gorgeous continent and what the dream of it actually was for so many, not uninspired capitialist consumption. Certainly the American Revolution and Civil War had not courageously offered so many hundreds of thousands of young men to be slaughtered for that. Willa had always been a deep thinker and daring. She was about to find the way to shape her long thought-out vision into very real existence, her own existence as she must, as tenuous as it feels to leave the jobs of teaching and editing behind, but one must if the soul demands its broader fire burn, and she was headed for the American Southwest.
As she was packing to leave she met at the cafe of the Brevoort Hotel, visible right up from Washington Square Arch up Fifth Avenue, with the interim editor of McClure’s who was taking her place. She wasn’t trying to sell her story, “The Bohemian Girl” but he wanted it. It was the end of February 1912. It was the perfect beginning for this trip into her own feminine wild blue yonder. Ten years earlier she had gone by ship to France for the first time, her life-long cultural and literary inspiration. What could the American Southwest offer beyond the cultivation of the centuries-refined life-affirming lines of tradition of authentic birthright and its immaculate care where each occasion celebrates the secular rituals dedicated to the togetherness and the humanistic?
That very question opens up the magic of what she would find true and real and waiting for her own expression. The American Southwest was going to tell her.
New Mexico entered statehood in January 1912 just as she was readying her plans. She was first going to Winslow, Arizona by train to join up with her brother. Each step of the trip was momentously, naturally opening the reality of her inspiration in these boundaries beyond her own childhood wild and free natural Nebraska (making her sensitive to its changing personality and emanation of expression speaking to her), and this would culminate in New Mexico when she saw the path of how to deliver herself and her vision in this landscape. The United States of America is in its most gorgeous, formidable, and realist sense its geographical terrain that most autonomously, naturally rejects outside voice, opinion, and intrusion because it already knows itself through its vast solidity, realness, and stillness. The approach to that landscape and relation of self to it and the stance towards its inhabitants is a revelation of arrival and what its eternalness in form reveals.
It is the same if one sits in personal communion with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks for her revelation. She knows who she is and a cathedral is somewhat grandly just mimetic to gather, isolate, and lift the soul in incapsulated mimetic ritual. Here is the real experience, the real identity in solidity of fact, and with it the possibility of the real life orgasmic in the everyday.
How Willa could know this is a long study and relationship with French and Italian art, literature, and culture, but being in America and feeling the absense of
